Cape Croker

I’ve been going to Cape Croker for eight years. It’s a camp site on an Ojibway Reserve, just north of Wiarton, in the Purple Valley, on the east side of the Bruce Peninsula. I’ve come to feel about the place that it’s one of my spiritual grounding spots. It’s a place I go to for stripping down, to becoming a more basic me. I carry and practice some indulgences there, but I also find ways to release my grip on situations, problems and obsessions that imprison me in my day-to-day life.

I started coming here with Ponczka, the year after we met, a short time after we bought our house and began living together.

My previous history of camping had been insubstantial, but meaningful. I used to make excursions to the Olympic Peninsula of Washington State. I approached it then with a city dweller’s spontaneous indulgence, venturing out with no equipment but an old sleeping bag, a few items from my kitchen, some canned food, bread, peanut butter and juice. The coastline was a graveyard of old timber, and one of the chief pleasures of these excursions was to set myself a roaring fire and keep it going throughout the two or three evenings and nights. The other highlight was the upward-looking hope for skies clear enough to reveal the thick-with-stars band of the Milky Way. On some trips I enjoyed the stars every night; on others, not at all; such was the ambivalence of a Washington coast sky.

This bit of the Peninsula, over which shone the ever rotating beacon of the lighthouse on Destruction Isle, and where grey waves crashed and roared constantly, yet in different moods and intensities, became a spirit grounding place for me. Not the first or only such place; there have been many: the castle lake in Central Park, the bridge over the Charles in Cambridge. Lots of parks. And other places, too. The top of the Health Service hospital in Seattle, from where on early mornings I could not distinguish the snow on the peaks of the Cascades from wisps of morning cloud.

Lots of places have been invitations, to plug in, to settle, to release.... There are many metaphors and images to use. It strikes one in so many different ways, to be lifted up out of the everyday and given a glimpse of oneself removed from the fleeting cares and habits, to stand a bit more naked, to others, but mainly to oneself. Images arise of treasures that have come my way, in the form of people, places and experiences. I recall faces I thought I had forgotten, along with the names and the particulars of our brief encounters. I remember driving around in the middle of the night, at the end of my first day in San Francisco, with Rose, a woman I met while shooting pool in a bar. There was the bunch of guys sitting around a camp fire together in New Orleans, right where the Mississippi empties out into the Gulf of Mexico, on the night of Mardi Gras, with the revellers prancing and parading just a block away. There was the room in the barn outside of Austerlitz, New York, quiet and heavy with creative concentration and the coming on of Spring. There were the long moments of stillness on remote highways, moments that would’ve been lonely without all that space spreading everything out, so that loneliness became something entirely else, and waiting for that car to come over the horizon was like planting seeds you know will only come up when you are long gone.

Cape Croker is the inheritor of all my expectations and wants of spiritual places. And yet, its free of any claims I might have. I am happy when I go there, regardless of anything that might go wrong, or the discomforts brought on by mosquitos, storms and cold, blowing air. Peace and contentment emanate out of every stone and tree. It’s a place that relieves me of any sense of hurry or expectation bound by a clock. Time feels so abundant there that it’s impossible to feel that there could not be enough. And though I am aware of having felt that way, just a day before, and that I will surely feel that way again, while in those moments of tranquility, none of that matters. I slow down, until the gliding of the clouds across the sky becomes a ballet, and I note the change in the tide when it happens, and silence reveals itself for the constant chorus of life that it is.

We usually travel to Cape Croker on a Friday night, leaving a little after 9, and arriving in Cape Croker well after midnight. By that time, Ponczka is always asleep, and I have the pleasure of setting up tent and air mattress by myself in the dark, trying not to make noise or use the flashlight any more than necessary. Sometimes I’ll start a fire. Other nights, if it’s clear, and especially if it’s the first trip of the year, and my first opportunity in months to see a star-filled sky, I’ll take a few minutes to gaze upward. Sometimes the glow of the moon is all the light that’s wanted.

There’s always a shift after the first twenty-four hours at Cape Croker. During the first day, tarps and gazebo go up, the hammock is slung between the trees; there comes the first dip into the sound, then the second. The kitchen area comes into being as food is prepared. And whatever is cooked comes with a flavour as though offered up directly by the nature all around us.

After a night’s sleep, I always awaken with a sense of being home, of belonging in this place where the rhythms invade and take me over, until I am myself in a way I haven’t been in awhile, if only because I haven’t taken the moments to feel and to know it. I play my sax, and l practice Tai Chi, and meditate, partly because these are good things to do, but more because the place invites me to move my body and spirit, to stretch and open. I make music because I feel the music waiting to come out, and I WANT to play. And my sax will play me, to the extent that I release myself to it. I find and live a different shading of myself, I breathe deeper.

The earth all through Purple Valley is thick with rocks. Escarpments to the north and south of the camping beach form cliffs of craggy formations, eroding slowly in geological time, years passing between rock falls. It’s an area of small ranches with weather beaten sheds, with cows and horses grazing between the clumps of stone. Ponczka and I watch the slow decay of two buildings we’d love to live in: a mansion on the main street in Wiarton, with thick panes of bowed glass framing the main room, a dumbwaiter and separate servant’s stairwell. The other is a school on the edge of the reserve. We dream of living there, our lives rooted in such a place, where weeks and months pass slowly, where growing old would not seem unnatural. We would start an Art Colony, where painters, writers and musicians would come to experience their spirit's release.

Coming Out From Under

My relationship with marijuana began in exploration and escape. In my late teens the exploration was about discovering the wide world, the layers and pathways of it. This meant discovering the new, but also re-discovering the familiar, via new experience, new thinking, new ideas, and new eyes. The escape was about leaving behind sadness, and skirting around the heavy consciousness of all the ways I was disconnected from people and places and events around me.

I loved the herb, and it wasn’t long before I was a devotee of “Yo Highness”. Was this addiction? I wondered from an early time. But the answer didn’t much involve me. So long as the exploration kept the world fresh, and so long as self-consciousness was overcome, well, why shouldn’t this be a way of life? It was a way of life that changed my life, and I had no way of considering that I would occupy an altered world for the next fifteen years, or what that might mean.

Three or four years into my near daily use of herb, I evolved a theory about the nature of being high. I speculated that what marijuana did was blend my waking and my dream states, so that under its influence I experienced a softness and malleability in the material world. It seemed that ideas, thoughts, feelings had more weight in this dimension, but also that physical realities counted for less. Understandable that music and art, books and nature drew me in more, and that my “ambition” gave way. Because the things I was ambitious about, my marijuana mind showed me, were less substantial than I had supposed. In the fuzzy, blended state I now inhabited, the meaning and weight of a thing was interlaced with that of many others. In the wild mix of possibility, everything was possible and nothing imperative. All things carried the added import of my dream sensibility as part of its materiality – the world had a kind of sixth dimension, a dimension beyond time.

After indulging regularly for fifteen years, I then practiced abstinence for fifteen. The journey into sobriety felt like a descent through clouds, through the trees and to the ground. And solid ground was an odd thing for some while. “Grounded” was the character that all of creation seemed to take on. Everything, even the watery and airy parts of existence, became very solid and heavy. There was a density, not only to matter, but also to actions and expressions, and to all the other tangibles and intangibles of life – even to such things as ideas, even dreams. Objects and beings no longer vibrated with essential energy, linked in that ideal, metaphysical domain of connectivity that marijuana had induced. This was, as an experience, much like a fall. Solid reality took getting used to. The impermeability of things made me feel like a superman robbed of his powers. This flatness felt dead and hard. It was difficult to adjust to. But only for the first year or so. After that, the herb dreamscape faded. It became the ‘other’ reality once again, and sobriety reclaimed Planet Earth.

In time, a beauty, a richness began to permeate my world again. For some years, I used mood altering substances hardly at all. In a way, it was a return to a consciousness that I’d abandoned in my late teens, those years of exploration. But it was different, in that I was no longer seeking relief through a distracted mind. In fact, I was going inward more, not seeking to numb or distract, but peeling away the reserve that had prevented me from exploring myself. And inside, I found a depth I had once mistakenly thought was only to be found out in the world somewhere. And this new “groundedness” translated into an abundance all through the material and experiential worlds. It was a time when I began to believe and to understand that the miraculous is everywhere.

Eventually though, through curiosity or nostalgia or hubris, I began to use again. Not like before. No more quiet, soft fogs that endured for weeks and months at a time, with only the occasional patch of fasting to refresh the enduring high. Now I used in short spikes, ranging from a single day to sometimes over a week, with stretches of two to six weeks in between. The highs I experience, as an occasional user, are richer and more transcendent than anything I experienced as a chronic user. Herb has become almost a sacrament as used this way, generating deep insights and triggering creative moments of synthesis on a regular basis. But these benefits only come after periods of abstinence. And I’ve learned that while a 1-day high clears in just one or two smokeless days, a binge that stretches to over a week will need a good two weeks or more to wear off entirely.

It is now both transitions between high and sober states that I recognize as revelatory. It’s a two way trip, as across a border between states, that border perhaps like the surface of a lake, or a doorway between dimensions. It recalls to me my early theory, about the blending of the dream and waking states, two modes of being we experience that parallel one another, each with an authenticity and realness when we are in it. The transition in one direction mirrors the transition in the other. There’s a ‘high’ to coming down, to the clearing of the mind, to the shifting away from the dream state, just as there is to the rush that comes after that first toke, the intake of smoke, and the shift, as intoxication comes on. It’s a very different high: slower, re-orienting rather than disorienting, perhaps more of the body than of the mind. It too stimulates creativity and synthesis, in a way that’s more social and interactive and engaged with the world than that other high. It has given me a new understanding of mind and self. It has created in me a new balance. And It is a realm about which my understanding is still growing.

My herb use has had a major effect on my life, and I still struggle over the import of this. Having a differently functioning mind altered the course of my life, and I sometimes find myself wondering whether I was diverted from my rightful path when I started to smoke, or whether I found it. To decide one way or another would require a commitment to particular philosophical or moral positions. For example, that any mind but the ‘natural’ mind represents a diminishment. Or, that the various perceptual and conceptual breaks with orthodoxy that my herb use stimulated represent a liberation. I don’t know that I’ll ever decide one way or another. I tend to think that I won’t, if only because I reject the notion that the "either-or" absolute of such a choice represents the only way of viewing the issue.

One thing that’s certain is that I don’t want to condemn any experience that’s part of my road. I want to believe that “I can reach heaven from Here”, wherever Here might be. It’s a reflection of my faith that all of my experiences can be a part of my positive growth, and that, in the words of the poem Desiderata, “...no doubt, the universe is unfolding as it should”.